I’d like to talk about a concept that has been developing in my mind over the past few months, that I call “the gap”. The gap contains the potentially helpful treatments, often based on scientific literature and capabilities of various healing systems, but not proven in the medical literature by double blind studies or evidence-based studies. Some of these are accessible only by extreme or serendipitous circumstances, such as a particularly skilled acupuncturist, or in the jungles of Brazil. Others are accessible by working via a combination of medically and scientifically based concepts through the perspective of integrative medicine and concepts borrowed from other healing traditions. It may employ energetic or other perspectives, such as Applied Kinesiology, which I use, to corroborate, point out, or refine diagnostic data and choice of treatment.

It has been my experience that people who are guided using methods as above have a good chance of healing skin issues that were otherwise designated as incurable, or as treatable only with medications with potentially life-threatening medications. Those medications or more invasive treatments may be crucial and lifesaving in some instances. But that space of “nowhere to go” when reasonable applications of integrative methods could control the condition, is what I call “The Gap”.

I have been fortunate in my career to have been helping a lot of people who have fallen into “the gap”. I hope that this kind of help, and the support that goes with it, will become a lot more available in terms of capable practitioners, insurance coverage, and available products. Besides safety, correcting underlying conditions to clear skin issues also improves other inflammatory conditions that have led to a multitude of problems often not even mentioned in a detailed medical history.

In the next several blogs, I will discuss this issue of “the gap”, the contributing issues, and what the benefits are of narrowing “the gap”.

ARE YOU TIRED ALL THE TIME?

Here’s a Natural, Functional Medicine Perspective on tiredness…

Are you tired all the time? I think I understand that feeling. Of course, the biggest cause of feeling tired all the time is not getting enough sleep and that can either be because you have trouble sleeping, or because you’ve got too much to do, or you want to do too much. Of course, those are problems that need to be corrected by doing what ever it takes to manage to get more sleep.

Sometimes, even taking catnaps can be very helpful in restoring your energy when you haven’t had enough asleep at night. Because to push straight through really puts a strain on your adrenals and a strain on the rest of your body.

There are other reasons why people are tired all the time and one of them is chronic fatigue. Chronic fatigue can be caused by chronic infections, by food allergies and by inflammation going on in your system. It drains your system of its energy because it’s so busy fighting the various targets that it thinks needs to be dealt with. If that’s the case, you really need to take care of improving your digestion, getting the inflammation calmed down and dealing with the underlying causes such as leaky gut and often dealing with the various hormonal issues that have arisen to compensate for the problems that have been going on such as supporting the adrenals or even the thyroid gland. In that way, you can begin to restore yourself and your energy.

I’ve seen people with everything from thyroid disease to just food allergy and inflammatory conditions that lead to tiredness and fatigue all the time, completely change their lives to the point where they just thought before, that tiredness was natural, a natural statement. They were amazed to get the amount of energy that they regained. That can be a really wonderful thing, because it can allow you to live more your life more joyously, so you are not dragging yourself from one place to another.

You can translate that into becoming more productive as well, having more time for you and more time to earn your living. Making the investment, working with somebody who does holistic and integrative medicine could be a big benefit, getting you back to your normal god given energy and back to actually enjoy your day.

Chronic Fatigue is Exhausting!

Are you ready to treat it naturally with holistic medicine? People who have chronic fatigue often drag themselves through their lives and sometimes have such low energy to get to work everyday. When it gets really bad, they often have to drop out of school, drop out of work, or their lives are miserable pushing themselves to keep awake and keep doing what they need to do.

Chronic fatigue doesn’t have to be all the time. It can be cured. It can be helped. I’ve had patients who have had such severe chronic fatigue they couldn’t work, go on to complete school while working full-time and join the Marines. It really can change if you change the problems that are underlying. This was not by giving stimulants. This was by fixing their digestive system, getting their autoimmune conditions under control, getting their digestive inflammation under control, changing the way they were able to process foods, taking the stress off of their immune systems, off their adrenals and turning them around.

Chronic fatigue can be very exhausting, but it can also be an opportunity to restore the body to normal function by following all the leads that are causing it and getting to the base of it, which is something that a holistic and integrative physician can do.

Are there Autoimmune Drug Alternatives?

Consider the cost of treatments that are currently available for autoimmune disorders. They have been developed using a large amount of technology that’s evolved over a number of years. Some of those drugs cost $6,000 a month in order to gain control of your autoimmune condition. These diseases are powerful. Imagine a natural treatment that does something similar for you, and you can get an idea of how much commitment it would require to get a handle on something that challenges your body this much.

Let this give you an idea how much energy is required from you and how much holistic medicine commitment is required in changing your lifestyle and in delving into the various causes in order to get a handle on it and to reverse the condition.

So if you want to avoid the $6,000 a month costs, and the potential dangers that go along with these powerful drugs, you have to make serious long-term commitments to dietary and lifestyle changes. And to the medical expenses related to testing and holistic treatments.

Keep digging until you get to the bottom of the causes that are going on for your system, so that you can get control of your own condition naturally. There are alternatives to autoimmune pharmaceuticals, but they’re not for everyone.

Why Does the Body Attack Itself?

Your body ought to know who’s you and who’s not you, right? This is what whole immune system is set up to figure out: who is you and who is not. This is an extremely important task, and this task is done by a whole network of different cells. Indeed, when you’re born, your body determines who is you and who is not. The immune system becomes tolerant of cells that are you. When there is an external attacker, like a bacteria, your body produces antibodies to destroy it.

But, when there is a subtle threat, such as one of your own cells transforming into a tumor (or virus or a fungus) living inside your cells, altering your cells, then it takes a very subtle immune system to detect that there is a difference and to recognize and attack those altered cells.

When your immune system becomes confused, perhaps because of various issues, you can become sensitized to that cell or foreign agent that looks a little bit like your own cell. With the confusion from something else going on, you can attack your own self by mistake, and that’s what we call autoimmune inflammation. The following can sensitize or confuse your immune system, especially if more than one of these things is present in your body at once:

stress

a virus

infections

vaccinations

medications

exposure to something that looks like some particular cell or cell component

Just the wrong set of circumstances can cause this “confusion” so that perhaps a bacteria or virus entering your body looks a little like some particular cell in your body. Your body attacks that bacteria and then begins to attack that cell in your body.

For example, certain viruses can cause an attack on the cells in the pancreas that make the insulin, which can cause Type One Diabetes. There are whole number of examples that are known and there are probably thousands or even millions more that have not been recognized.

These are some of the ways that autoimmune conditions can arise in your body and that your body might even attack itself. You can treat autoimmune disease with holistic medicine, but it requires real commitment.

THE DANGER IN MAKING THE INTERNET YOUR DOCTOR

Looking for the best natural skincare? First, let me say there may be a lot of information out there that is true and good. I don’t want to dismiss that, but the big problem is when a person relates their story about healing a skin condition, yet they do not give you enough information on why that particular product made a difference.

Often, even if they are telling the truth, you do not know that they are leaving something important out. Even if they are telling the truth and are not leaving anything out, they may still not be giving you enough background to understand what made their condition made better. You don’t know that the particular thing that they said helped, is really going to help you as well.

Sometimes you can go off on a tangent with self-help medicine for long enough to do other kinds of damage. You may have avoided treatment that would be helpful. When you are reading health blogs, read them with a little bit of extra care. Be sure you do not take that information as the absolute knowledge of what will make your skin better. See a doctor for signs of anything serious or chronic.

Who are the Best Candidates for Using Holistic Skincare?

Interviewer: Describe the kind of patient who is most likely to have successful outcome with your treatment, what might they have to do that is a challenge.

Dr. Dattner: Well, the people who have the best results with me are first of all really motivated. There is not a question about whether this is a yes or no, or what the priority is. And unfortunately, a lot of people are not so clear about their priorities and they are also not so clear about…. The important thing I just want to mention is that I see skin disease as a symptom more that I see it as a condition. So my perspective is what is this telling us, what can we change and how can this impact a person’s life, so I love to have positive side effects.

Interviewer: Right

Dr. Dattner: Persons gets more energy they run faster they…. you know. Instead of having negative…

Interviewer: Yes

Dr. Dattner: Exactly, leg swelling goes away. I thought at least things that they didn’t even mention get better and to me that’s really what it’s about. So the kinds of….

Interviewer: So the kinds of patients who might most likely respond.

Dr. Dattner: So the kinds of patients then are ones who are first of all committed. Second of all, can actually afford the supplements and seeing me, you know if they can…. Unfortunately the government and the insurance will pay huge sums of money for certain medications.

Interviewer: Right

Dr. Dattner: They always have being receiving tens of thousands of dollars even more for certain medications, but they don’t pay now for cognitive work. So spending an hour or more with a patient and being versed in two or three different fields and up to date in those things, they don’t care about that and so it’s impossible to do this on insurance, unless somebody is feeding you money in the back. So unfortunately, it’s too big. I think there is going to be a day when this becomes recognized, when it becomes clear that there is some people who I can fix for much less money in a conventional way. And it’s a small group and it’s a definite group and there are people to be paid for. But at this particular time, people have to be able to afford to do this and they have to be willing to give up favorite foods. Often it’s, the drink at work or afterwards, things that they would crave, that’s sometime the biggest challenge.

Interviewer: Yeah, habits breaking them.

Dr. Dattner: Breaking habits, breaking the expectations of their friends and their husband and their family who says come on….

Interviewer: Right

Dr. Dattner: So those people who can make those changes and the last one is, since I haven’t found the magic way to do this, they have to take supplements and that means taking a bunch of pills.

Are Toxins Making You Fat? Time for a natural cleanse or detoxification.

Could toxins be contributing to your weight gain and to your difficulty in losing weight? Well, I think they are very likely. Let’s just talk about a few different ways in which they can.

First of all, we use a lot of different pesticides and preservatives in your food supply. And unless you are eating 100% pure foods that have been grown away from civilization, you probably have accumulated a lot of those.

Also from automobile exhaust, from various kinds of paints and chemicals that are used around the home and at work for spraying, for insecticides, and all sorts of industrial locations, even if you don’t spray at home.

All of these are sources of toxins that get into your environment, and into your body. And many of them are fat soluble. So that means they are stored in the compartment of your body. So when you start losing weight and fat cells break down and release the fat, what happens to the toxins that dissolve there?

Well, in the old days, fat reduction programs usually consisted of taking diet pills and drinking diet Tab. And smoking. And were accompanied by headaches and feeling bad. And why is that? It’s because you are concentrating those toxins and body has to deal with them and some of them are going to the brain and causing you to feel lousy.

Many of the weight loss programs today involve detoxification preparations that enhance the removal of fat toxins from the body. They support the livers and the kidneys, there are herbs that are used traditionally for that purpose for centuries, and those are incorporated in some of those diet systems.

Other sources of toxins include the bacteria that live in our large intestine, especially in abnormal bacteria that can back up into the small intestine, and get out through a leaky gut. Those kinds of toxins often cause some persons to have fatigue and not to feel good. And they may also be part of bloating and other disorders. So there are a number of totally different sources of toxins that are involved in the body.

Finally, there are heavy metals that are involved in our home environment including arsenic and cadmium and other metal toxins that have the ability to compete with the normal methods that are present in our enzyme systems which break down various substances and are part of our entire metabolic cycle. So if those enzymes get gummed up with toxic minerals, they just don’t work right. And then we begin to build up all the by-products that should have been converted and disposed of by our system. Still another way in which toxins can really mess up our system.

It is important to identify the issue so that we can use the proper means for removal. In any case, it’s really helpful to have somebody who knows what they are doing, both in taking your history, looking at you and in doing testing in order to identify and help you get rid of the toxins that are in your body that are causing you to have difficulty losing weight and to not feel your normal self.

Could inflammation cause belly fat?

What causes people to have belly fat? Well, there are a number of different things that contribute to it. Obviously, eating too much sugar and simple carbohydrates is one way to add extra belly fat. And cutting back on that can make a difference.

Also, the kind of food you eat determines the kind of organisms that live in your intestine. Not a few but approximately 30 to 100 trillion bacteria live inside your intestinal tract. And some of those determine whether you are going to gain weight or not. And it seems that the kinds of foods you eat have a big influence on what is actually living inside of you, and they help determine whether you are going to gain fats. So when you are eating, you are not just feeding yourself, you’re feeding the organisms which are talking to the system that determines whether fat cells increase or fat cells decrease.

And eating a lot of vegetables and some protein is a lot different from eating a lot simple carbohydrates, not only feeding your fat but feeding your organisms.

In addition, when you have a lot of stress you release cortisol, and there are people who believe that the cortisol has influence on gaining belly fat. So reducing stress by getting regular exercise, meditation, breathing exercises can make a big difference as well. Finally in metabolize according local exercise in the muscle tone, and if you are using your abdominal muscles by doing crunches or by doing exercises that involve your abdominal muscles, not only do you burn fat while you are doing that, but you burn fat all day long and all night long because those muscles are having more metabolic activity and requiring more energy. So that’s an additional way to get your body to burn up that belly fat.

So conversely, people who don’t get any exercise, who sit on a couch, work sitting down, and don’t get any extra exercise are likely going to gain more belly fat.

So the holistic medicine of eating right, exercising right, and managing stress can all help reduce belly fat.

Today, Dr. Leo Galland releases his new book, “The Allergy Solution”.

This book gives a comprehensive explanation of allergy and all of the conditions that can be related to allergy and inflammation. It affirms many of the points described in my book, “Radiant Skin from the Inside Out”. Points that developed out my research on inflammation and immune recognition, and had their practical development through Functional Medicine. For those suffering from allergy and related symptoms, this book gives a good practical understanding of how to gain control by getting at the underlying causes.

Dr. Galland is a colleague with whom I have shared the path of Integrative Medicine, who I have known since NYU Medical school. We have become close colleagues in the past 17 years, as co-members of a seminal group of integrative medicine physicians who met several times each year with outstanding integrative speakers.